At Conference 2016 I made a presentation about the 'discovery' process, figuring out how big the hill was, so to speak, and planning where effort would need to be made to bring the website up to date. If you fancy a bit of a read that presentation is available as a 4.8MB PDF here. (Edited to remove animations/demos and without my rambling dialogue probably doesn't make that much sense!)

Long story short: While it would be technically easy, although time consuming, to do a big copy-and-paste into a pretty new website template the need to make some changes to now NZART handles information on the website was apparent.

This involves creating a tool that lives in behind the site to manage some of the information presented on the site and allow NZART officers to keep that up to date and relevant.

Keeping that information up to date means more people will trust and use the website and in turn updates will flow to NZART more regularly. It's a win-win, in theory at least.

The first area of the website to be updated was the officers listing which was a bit out of date and made a good test for the intended 'API driven' design of the new site.

With that out of the way and working the Branch listings are now under scrutiny. With help from Branch secretaries and the callbook editor all of the listings will be brought up to date and moved from the flat-text listings in the CMS to the new database driven API model so that they can be presented cleanly into the new website in 2017.

You can see the listings that have been updated on the new branch listings page here and the goal is to get all of the branch listing data into the new system by the end of January along with the addition of a map based entry screen once enough of the branch records are checked.

As well as the work under the hood a few tweaks have been made to the look and feel of the current site to make it a little easier to use and fix some broken links but not a lot of effort will be spent there as the end goal is to move the site to a more modern template in the first half of 2017.

If you have any questions drop me an email at zl3lf@nzart.org.nz, I'm happy to discuss anything from my bad spelling down to the nuts and bolts of how the new API model will work for the technically curious.

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